An end to a tumultuous year for advertising agencies. What’s next ahead?

Dear reader, as 2025, a year of global tumult and volatility, rolls by, Mint's reporters and columnists look around the corner on what is coming in 2026—to help you know what to expect and prepare for it. Tell us what you think at [email protected].As 2025 draws to a close, advertising finds itself caught between consolidation and reinvention—forced to get bigger even as its traditional role grows smaller.

Under ordinary circumstances, a multi-billion dollar merger may be considered a sign of a rapidly progressing industry. But the $13.5 billion deal between Interpublic Group and Omnicom in November this year is more a sombre end to an exceptionally rough year for the Big Six (now five) advertising agency networks.The post-merger Omnicom is now the world’s largest advertising network with $25 billion in revenues, but the network and its peers WPP, Publicis, Havas and Dentsu are contending with their increasing irrelevance.

Big Tech firms increasingly eat into the business of advertising and a flood of artificial intelligence (AI) applications are quickly automating all parts of advertising – from creating them, to buying media, to managing campaigns across an endless choice of platforms and content.These long-term changes are already causing damage to the industry in India. Layoffs are likely to start soon among agencies owned by IPG and Omnicom, especially as the two companies discarded many legendary agencies, including FCB and DDB.

We wrote about this in Mint earlier this month; the merger has only made a prevailing anxiety worse.Per global marketing research firm COMvergence, billings for most of the world's top agency networks have been barely growing or declining. For instance, in 2024, Dentsu's global billings